Quote

Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

William Golding

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Golding
Age: 81 †
Born: 1911
Born: September 19
Died: 1993
Died: June 19
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Newquay
Cornwall
William Gerald Albert Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding
Haven
Read
True
Contemporary
Time
Main
Awful
Honestly
Writers
Havens

More quotes by William Golding

Image
You'll get back to where you came from.
William Golding
Image
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding
Image
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
William Golding
Image
How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
William Golding
Image
The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
William Golding
Image
I am here and here is nowhere in particular.
William Golding
Image
Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
William Golding
Image
Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
Image
We're not savages. We're English.
William Golding
Image
I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
William Golding
Image
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
William Golding
Image
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
William Golding
Image
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding
Image
One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
William Golding
Image
As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.
William Golding
Image
We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
William Golding
Image
Which is better -- to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better -- to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
Image
Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
William Golding
Image
In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
William Golding
Image
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding